Interview with Patty Mishic O’Brien, Chief Growth & Sustainability Officer, Teknor Apex Company

In this interview with Patty Mishic O’Brien, Teknor Apex's Chief Growth & Sustainability Officer, she discusses how sustainability is evolving the meaning of "high performance" for customers. O’Brien emphasizes that today's high performance includes technical excellence and meeting impact and regulatory targets. Customers seek materials that perform well, improve efficiency, and support circularity without sacrificing quality or productivity.

Teknor Apex's Ventures Group plays a crucial role in identifying emerging technologies, connecting them with formulation expertise, and manufacturing capabilities. This accelerates the transition of innovative materials from concept to commercial application at scale. O’Brien highlights that sustainability should not compromise profitability, but rather drive efficiency and value.

She identifies the packaging space as having the strongest business cases for sustainable materials, driven by policies like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation. The article suggests that collaboration between material suppliers, customers, OEMs, and regulators is essential to shorten the timeline for scaling new materials.

Notable barriers include scale, supply, and customer confidence. Verified traceability systems, such as ISCC PLUS and RecyClass, help overcome these challenges. Fragmentation across the value chain is seen as a risk to the resilience of the system, and early engagement from material suppliers is recommended to accelerate sustainable materials adoption.

AI is viewed as a tool for both optimizing existing materials and discovering new sustainable materials, with the potential to fundamentally change the process. O’Brien predicts that for sustainability to become deeply embedded in the plastics industry by 2030, a collaborative systems-level approach is required, encompassing collection, sorting, reprocessing, and end-market demand.